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Thursday, July 7, 2016

Summer vacation in California’s Eastern Sierra

I haven’t posted much in the last two weeks because we’ve had friends from Australia staying with us. Last week we spent four days in the Eastern Sierra, the vast high desert east of the Sierra Nevada range. Sparsely populated and spectacularly beautiful, this part of California is a wonderland of mountains and lakes, sagebrush and tumbleweed, and even the occasional ghost town. In the “olden days” my wife and I spent quite a bit of time of here, camping and exploring. In the last 15 years, our visits have been few and far between, but the Eastern Sierra is always in our heart.

Mono Lake at sunset

Our home base was in Mammoth Lakes, the largest and most developed town in the Eastern Sierra. Located at an elevation of 7,880 feet (2,400 m), Mammoth Lakes is a world-class ski resort which in the off-season (summer) offers remarkably reasonable accommodations and easy access to alpine lakes, hiking, fishing, mountain biking and a host of other outdoor activities. It’s a great spot to explore everything the area has to offer.

Here are a couple of maps to give you a better idea of the geography of the Eastern Sierra. In the first map, the turquoise area points at Davis and the red arrow at Mammoth Lakes. Los Angeles is all the way to the south and Las Vegas to the southeast. Driving time from Davis to Mammoth Lakes is about 5 hours, not including stops.

The second map shows the territory we covered in more detail. The main attractions we visited are marked in red. The turquoise area points at Yosemite National Park, which we drove through on our way home.

So what did we see on a trip? So much that I could spend a week writing about it! But don’t worry, I’ll pack the highlights into this one post.

Mountain pride (Penstemon newberryi) growing in cracks in the granite at Olmsted Point, Yosemite National Park

⦿ GHOST TOWNS

We spent a wonderful morning at Bodie State Historic Park, arguably the best preserved and most photogenic ghost town in the entire western U.S. Located at an elevation of 8,379 ft (2,554 m), Bodie is exposed to the elements year round:

Winds can sweep across the valley at close to 100 miles per hour (160 km/h). Nights remain cold even through the summer, often dropping well below freezing. Bodie rivals notorious Barrow, Alaska as the locality in the United States with most nights below freezing;[37] in fact no month has ever been completely frost-free. (1)

Bodie has stirred the imagination like no other ghost town. In the late 1800s, a girl moving with her family from San Francisco to Bodie, then at the height of its gold production, famously said, “Goodbye God, I’m going to Bodie.” I don’t know if she was referring to the harsh climate or the rough-and-tumble lifestyle of a town that sported 65 saloons and who knows how many bordellos.

The State of California has a done a great job preserving the buildings that are left. With the exception of the church and one residence, none of them are routinely open to the public. But it’s easy enough to press your face against the windows to peek inside.

I’m always amazed by how few Californians have visited the Eastern Sierra. I think you’re more likely to encounter tourists from Europe than folks from San Francisco. That’s a real pity because the Eastern Sierra is the epitome of the rugged West. Don’t miss it!